qi peng, conceptual artist

During my June 2009 solo show at envoy enterprises, I started to take a lot of documentary photographs of my friends and acquaintances in the contemporary art world. Some of these persons I met through email, Twitter, Facebook, or other social networking websites. I begun to realize that I could use these homemade snapshots as the basis for an extensive series of oil paintings and works on paper entitled "the arbitrageur," a term that refers to the misalignment within economic markets. I have asked myself often whether I "profited" from the alchemy of a public view into the private situations of artists and their lifestyles and social expressions.

Eventually, I began to add Facebook photographs and even New York Times articles as part of my source material. I consider these works from "the arbitrageur" to be complex examinations into the sociology of the contemporary art world, humorous asides into the privations of studio visits or causal opening receptions, and a deconstruction of the theater of how artists live within everyday life. It becomes a collision between postmodern self-referentiality and networks with the sharp neo-realism of Maupassant short stories filled with the gamut of humanity. Crisp slices of lives from the artist's situations that mirror our own, whether or not we are involved in the contemporary art world.

"the arbitrageur" becomes a continual exploration into these hidden stories which are not seen by the average reader/viewer. Metaphors for the utopia where artists seek freedom from mundanity.